Cleveland City: The Screenplay

"You think you can catch Keyser Soze? You think a guy like that comes this close to getting caught, and sticks his head out?" - Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects It's Halloween weekend. Across the country, kids and adults alike are dressing up in costume, trick or treating and attending parties galore. Wearing a costume and, especially a mask, is holiday tradition, one that passes generation to generation. Superheroes, monsters, sexy nurses and the latest political and pop culture references serve as muse for All Hallow's Eve. For the characters in Film Noir, to quote the band Ministry, "everyday IS Halloween." We, the audience, rarely know who is the hero, who is the monster and who is both. Sometimes we guess and feel good about ourselves and our deductive intelligence. And sometimes we're so surprised, no shocked, that we shiver in flashback, thinking how could we have possibly missed that detail. Remember Verbal Kint? This is one of the bigges...

Film Noir showcases the duality of man like no other genre. As I write this post the whole Harvey Weinstein scandal has broken out. The film producer, Hollywood mogul, husband, father and philanthropist is on his knees. The exact same position he forced onto so many of his victims. He's done tremendous evil. He's done tremendous good. He's an angel to some. The devil himself to others. The most interesting fictional characters are complex. Multi-dimensional. Unconventional. We like it when, good or bad, they surprise us.   There's two qualities that define our interest in the characters we see on screen: motivation and action. When we see Superman save the cat from the tree we know he's a good guy. But what if he still saved the cat but at the expense of killing a puppy? What would we think of him then? Would his likeability be driven solely based on the audience's love or contempt towards either animal species? And who is more real, Superman or Clark ...

"(Film Noir is) a movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending." - Roger Ebert It all started with the alleys of Cleveland. Living in downtown Cleveland, back when it was the uncool thing to do, to bypass traffic patterns, you often took shortcuts. Alleys are the very best shortcuts and so much of noir is anchored in alleys and shadows because the characters in film noir at a critical and often desperate time of their lives took a shortcut. And they've been paying for it ever since. Urban alleys, especially of those Midwest metropolises that cultivated during the industrial revolution, are dark and narrow and creepy. They typically house garbage dumpsters, building back doors and shady parking spots for even shadier cars. Sometimes there's rats, often used as cinema symbolism to signify a betrayer. The combination of alleys (short cuts) and rats (betrayers) and absence of light (darkness) creates an atmosphere of clau...